


don't be afraid (the shadows know me)

by CheerUpLovely



Series: endless summer [2]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Mental Health Issues, discussions of counselling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 00:21:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20017180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheerUpLovely/pseuds/CheerUpLovely
Summary: He remembers the way his mother tried to shy her eyes away, the way Thea crept further into his room with wide, horrified eyes, the way Laurel had looked at him like he was barely a shred of the boy she remembered. He remembers the way people’s eyes flicker from horror to disbelief, to pity.He doesn’t remember Felicity’s, he wasn’t conscious when she first saw them, but he remembers the first them she kissed his scars and made him feel like he was loveable with them.And now, his son is seeing his scars for the first time.





	don't be afraid (the shadows know me)

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my entry for the Olicity Summer Sizzle Weekly Challenge! As usual any mistakes are of my own rubbish typing and writing while growing my nails is not the best combination of side hobbies. I've actually been working on this idea for over a year and finally finished it this morning, and for clarity this is mostly a much needed conversation between Oliver and William shortly after Slabside is over, where they explore their mental health and what they might or want from that.

The gasp of breath makes his blood still. 

Despite years of self-assurance in his body image, given the abundance of scars and unwilling tattooed art, Oliver still feels himself panic in moments like this. It hasn’t happened in so long, but he remembers each one with such clarity.

He remembers the way his mother tried to shy her eyes away, the way Thea crept further into his room with wide, horrified eyes, the way Laurel had looked at him like he was barely a shred of the boy she remembered. He remembers the way people’s eyes flicker from horror to disbelief, to pity.

He doesn’t remember Felicity’s, he wasn’t conscious when she first saw them, but he remembers the first them she kissed his scars and made him feel like he was loveable with them. 

And now, his son is seeing them for the first time. 

It’s a little after two in the morning. Oliver hasn’t been able to fall asleep at all so far, although Felicity is fast asleep and has been for hours. She’s never had trouble falling asleep, which he’s always been envious of. Even at their most troublesome times, when they’ve been threatened and worried and desperate, she’s always been able to fall asleep anywhere if she was tired enough. He’s caught her sleeping at her desk, on the couch, in cars, on planes, and even once curled up in the cot he used to sleep on in the old foundry. William had gone to bed a little later than they would have liked, but it was a Friday night so they’d overlooked an extra hour on his console as they had no plans for the following day. 

Oliver had given up on watching Felicity sleep and decided to come out to the kitchen for a drink of water. He always sleeps without a shirt, regardless of the weather, he just runs hot. He hadn’t for a moment imagined that this would happen though. 

He turns and sees that look on his son’s face. The one he won’t forget. The look where his son really starts to piece together things that he had decided not to tell him about his time away. Some of the things that William knew were already too much, he’d decided. His son had suffered a trauma all of his own and he didn’t want him to carry any of the weight of his own physical scars.

“Dad,” he murmurs quietly.

William has one scar of his own from Lian Yu. It rests along his hairline, other than that, the island has only given him the same multitude of mental scarring that Oliver carries with him. 

Oliver stands up from where he’d been sitting on the couch and moves towards him. William doesn’t move and he’s just grateful that he doesn’t back away altogether.

“What are you doing up?” he asks quietly.

William visibly swallows. “I-”

Sensing the discomfort, Oliver reaches for the nearby laundry basket on the dining table and grabs the first clean t-shirt on top of it. “Sorry, I’ll-” he makes a vague gesture and slips the shirt over his head. 

William doesn’t stop him.

“I didn’t know there were so many,” William says once his scars are covered.

“I forget they’re there sometimes,” Oliver muses, which he does. He doesn’t think about them as much as he used to. “It’s ok,” he assures his son.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. 

“William, there’s nothing you need to be sorry for,” he assures him, keeping his voice as light as possible. Though the conversation feels anything but light.

“I’m sor--okay,” William corrects himself, his eyes darting around the room nervously. 

“What are you doing up?” Oliver asks him instead, to try to turn the conversation.

His boy shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me either. Come on, let’s sit for a while.”

—-

Oliver makes his famous hot chocolate and father and son settle onto the couch. Well, it’s not especially famous but Felicity once bragged that it should be. She was raised on the convenience of instant brands and Oliver learned from Raisa that the only way to make hot chocolate is over the stove with carefully stirred milk and hints of “magic ingredients” that he can’t bring himself to tell her because he loves to watch her guess the combination.

William sips gingerly from his mug while the elephant in the room chokes at them both. Oliver has never wanted to burden William with any of the darker details of his life, he’s simply wanted to be the father that he hasn’t had a chance to be for the first years of his son's life, but now he watches how his son is as nervous around him now as he was when he first started living with him and he wonders if still trying to shield him from the realities of his life is the best approach.

Lying and deception have never helped any of his relationships. Why should it help now?

“William, if you have anything that you want to ask me, you can,” he tells his son. “I can’t promise that the answer will be a good one, but I will be as honest as I can.”

The offer falls on a still room initially, William still focused on the red Flash mug with the irritating lightning bolt Oliver’s only ‘accidentally’ tried to damage once. It wasn’t his fault, though. Iris had called Felicity and explained to her that their daughter from the future was currently with them and Barry seemed to be bragging in the background about how easy it was to connect with her and how she idolized him and his underlying insistence that parenting was easy and so natural for him that it made Oliver want to scream for all the work he was doing with William.

“Do they hurt?” William asks him eventually. 

Oliver thinks about his scars before he responds. “Not physically. Not for a long time now.”

“Felicity fusses over your knee sometimes,” William points out.

“She’s right to, but that’s not a scar,” he explains. “It was an injury I received while I was in a fight and I didn’t let it heal properly, so it gives me trouble from time to time.”

“But none of those scars hurt you?” 

He shakes his head. “These scars, these ones you can see, they heal. Once they’ve healed they can’t hurt you anymore. New skin grows over and you can see it, but it’s a rebirth. All that can hurt you are the memories of how you got them.”

“Is that what happens for you?” William asks. “Why you never sleep much?”

It’s something he’s hoped that his son hasn’t noticed about him but it’s also something he can’t avoid. “Yes. Emotional scars are worse. A lot of them I’ve learned to realize aren’t my fault or accepted that I did the best I could in the situation, but some of them won’t ever leave me and they won’t ever stop hurting.”

“Like what?”

Oliver swallows, knowing now that this is clearly going to be a rougher conversation than he’s planned on this being. But he owes his son as much truth as he can give him, and he can only hope that this honesty can bring them closer together. 

“William, I’m sorry you lost your mom, I really am,” he tells him and on cue William instantly looks down and away from him. He’s never liked to talk about his mother with Oliver, not since she passed. “But that doesn’t stop me being grateful that you didn’t have to witness it.”

William‘s head raises back to his. “Is that what happened with your mom?”

“She was murdered,” he nodded. “Thea and I had to see it happen.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

“When I was...awa….” he stopped, cutting himself off deliberately. Even after all these years, glossing over his time on Lian Yu was for the sake of what others would prefer to her. Now that Lian Yu held shared horrors for them all, it was time for that to stop. “... _ first on the island _ . Someone gave me a choice between two women I cared for and asked me to choose which life to save. I offered myself up instead and the choice was made for me. A woman lost her life, and the man who loved her swore revenge because of that.”

“But you didn’t choose for her to die,” William frowned. “That’s not fair.”

“There were complications, he couldn’t see reason very well at the time,” Oliver explains without going into too much detail about what the Mirakuru has done to Slade Wilson. “Ultimately, someone he loved very much was gone and he was looking for someone to blame.”

“So he killed your mom?”

“He crashed a car, and tried to make me choose again - between my mother and my sister.” 

“Aunt Thea lived.”

Oliver nods. “My mother chose. She wouldn’t allow anything to hurt Thea and she wouldn’t have me take their place. She gave herself up and we had to watch that happen. We were tied up, and I was injured already and...and it just happened right in front of us.”

Even now, years later, he can perfectly recall the shuddering memory of that sword entering his mother’s chest. He can still hear it ending her life, still hear Thea screaming. He finds it easier to recall fonder memories of his mother without immediately thinking of the circumstances of her death but that’s come with time, and he knows that he’ll remember the sight of his mother dying in front of him for the rest of his life.

“Did she suffer?” William asks softly.

“We all did,” he mutters, taking in a deep breath. He stretches his arm along the back of the couch to where his hand is almost touching his son's shoulder. William doesn’t move away like he once would but Oliver knows not to push. “I know you’re feeling a lot of anger and sadness for what happened to your mom, and I wish I could tell you that it goes away, but I don’t want to lie to you about that. I’m just grateful that you didn’t have to see it happen.”

“Like you did,” he follows.

Oliver nods. “I have a lot of good memories with my mom, the same with my dad. But that doesn’t take away the fact that I also have memories of their last moments that they were a part of my life, and there are bad days where that’s all I can see.”

“All I can see is nothing,” William tries to explain. “Like an empty space. That’s stupid, though.”

“It’s not stupid,” Oliver insists quickly, without dismissing the fact that William has just willingly shared with him for perhaps the first time. “She’s your mother and she’s gone. There’s always going to be a space in your life that she won’t be standing in.”

He nods slowly. “Do you feel that too?”

“All the time. Especially now that I have you. I never really pictured becoming a father or a husband, but I always imagined that she’d be there when I did. Although she did get to meet Felicity a few times.”

“Did she like her?” 

Oliver manages a weak smirk at that. “Not especially.”

“I can’t imagine that.”

“My mom didn’t see her like we do,” he points out. “Felicity always wants to do the right thing, and my mother wasn’t involved in very good or...legal things at the time, so she didn’t appreciate that.”

“Do you think she’d be happy for you now?” William asks him.

“The most important thing to me is that I’m happy now. I wasn’t for the longest time, and even when I could have been I wouldn’t let myself just be happy. I have a family now, and the family I have is happy and as healthy as can be.”

William somewhat rolls his eyes at him. “Is this an attempt at getting me to eat more vegetables because I already told Raisa I don’t like-”

Oliver shakes his head, cutting him off. He knows the butternut squash was a mistake mainly because Felicity went into great detail about it. “It’s my way of saying that as a family, and individually, we have been through things that a lot of people can’t even imagine, and perhaps it’s time that as a family we found a more constructive way of dealing with that.”

William frowns. “Like therapy?”

“Maybe,” Oliver sighs with an equally questioning tone. “Being one hundred percent honest won’t always be easy.”

“I don’t know how to tell a therapist that my mom was blown up by a psychopath.”

William is so blunt in his delivery of the truth that it reminds Oliver of himself sometimes. 

“I don’t know how to tell a therapist that my mom was stabbed by a superhuman psychopath,” he agrees. “Therapy might not be the thing that works for us anyway, or maybe it’ll work for some things and not for other things. The main thing is that we are a family now, however that came to be, and we owe it to ourselves to take the time to be healthy and not just physically.”

“It’s never going to stop hurting though, is it?” William points out.

“It’s always going to hurt in some way, but it won’t always hurt as badly as it does right now,” he tells his son.

“I overheard you telling Raisa that we didn’t need to go to therapy.”

Oliver sighs. “Maybe I was wrong. Or maybe I was right. We won’t know until we try, but I do know that a lot of things I’ve tried to push myself through the harder times with haven’t worked for me, but it’s always felt better when I’ve shared with the people who care about me.”

“I know I’m lucky to still have people who care about me,” William mumbles. It sounds recited, something that Oliver knows that Raisa has spent countless days reinforcing in William. But he also knows that when you lose someone as important as a parent it can blindside you go everyone else still around your side.

This time, Oliver does allow his hand to slip to his son's shoulder. “William, your mom loved you very much, and you miss her. But Felicity and I both feel very lucky to have you in our lives now, despite the circumstances. I don’t want you to feel conflicted about that. I know Felicity becoming a bigger part of our lives changes things, but I wouldn’t have moved forward with her without being absolutely certain that was a positive addition to our family. I don’t want you to think that you have to hide your feelings about your mom because it’s the three of us now, and likewise I don’t want you to worry that caring for Felicity would do anything to disappoint your mom,” both their eyes move to the shelf where a photograph and Samantha and William when he was much younger sits. He has a lot of photographs of her in his room but Oliver is insistent that she not be hidden away, and that William knew she could be talked about and still be part of his sons family. “She would want you to be happy because that’s what all parents want, and your memories of your mom are precious. They are a part of you, that makes them a part of our family, and you never have to shut those down.”

William’s eyes linger on the photo for more than Oliver’s do. He wonders whether those photos his son hides in the drawer beside his bed might make a more public appearance now rather than just to be looked at when he’s feeling sad. “Thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“I want to,” he mumbles, looking down while he talks. “I know not every dad would step up and take in a kid they didn’t get to raise in the first place.”

“I’m not every dad,” Oliver points out. 

“No dad’s like you.”

Oliver’s head dips because he knows that is true. He doubts any other fathers are like him. A vigilante with a history of murder, vengeance and--

“That’s a good thing though. Not every dad would take their kid to see a therapist.”

“Well, every dad should, if that’s what’s needed, for any reason.” Oliver frowns. He knows he’s always shunned that kind of treatment for himself but having William in his life has made him realize how important it is for all of them to be able to communicate what they need.

“Do you really think it’s what I need?” He asks somewhat reluctantly. 

“Honestly, I don’t know what you need,” Oliver admits helplessly. “I didn’t know what I needed when I went through losing my mother. I can’t sit here and say that I’m not worried about you grieving, or struggling with PTSD, or ideas of depression or anxiety or all of the above and more, because I am,” he confesses. “You suffered one of the biggest losses you’ll ever face, and I know I can be here for you every step of the way, and I will, but I also might not be the most qualified person to know what you need. Luckily, there are people who can help us figure out what that is. This might just be the first small step in a big journey, but you are my son, and we are in this together, whatever it takes.”

“What if I do have any of those things?” William asks hesitantly.

“You mean anxiety or depression?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you have them, and that’s okay,” Oliver tells him. “The most important thing is that we know so we can learn what’s best for you. Maybe what you’re experiencing can’t be looked up in a book or given a name, and that would be okay too. Or maybe it’s something with a name that we can research and learn about. Either way, it becomes a part of our lives.”

“Right.”

William still doesn’t look sold on the idea so Oliver gives his shoulder an assuring squeeze. “They’re not bad words, Will. They’re just new to us, that’s all.”

“Yeah.”

He can see the same hesitance in his son that he feels himself. Unfortunately, William has inherited his sense of guilt and his eagerness to bottle up his emotions but Oliver knows that if they’re going to become a closer family that none of them can shy away from what they’ve experienced. 

He tugs lightly on William‘s shoulder. “Hey, come here,” he tempts, and with some awkward shuffling of empty mugs they end up shoulder to shoulder, and Oliver drops a kiss to the top of his sons head. The very few times he’s done this William’s been gone moments after but this time he stays there. “I love you.”

“I know ...I love you too.” William mutters

“I know.” Oliver echoes, though there’s a smile on his lips as he’s never heard those words from his son before.

“Felicity would like that,” William muses. “It’s her favorite part of Star Wars.”

“It is,” Oliver agrees before thoughts of Felicity fast asleep in their bed start pulling him towards a yawn. “I think I’m ready to get to bed at last. Do you think you can sleep now?”

William shakes his head. “I might read for a while.”

Oliver nods as he releases his son from his hold. “If you’re going to read out here, make sure you get a blanket out, just in case you fall asleep.”

“I will.”

“And if you-”

“-need anything, I’ll call you.” William finishes for him. 

Oliver smiles lightly. “You will. Goodnight, son.”

“Goodnight, dad.”

—-

When Oliver crawls into bed moments after ensuring that William doesn’t immediately move to turn to a games console after he thinks his father is asleep, he strips down to his underwear as usual and wraps himself around Felicity as he does every night. She’s similarly dressed in just a sports bra and her underwear since being curled up together each night is like sleeping with a furnace but neither are willing to sleep with space between them after they’ve spent so much time apart. 

“You’re a terrible fake sleeper,” he tells her quietly once he’s been settled for a few long moments.

“How could you tell?”

“You’re trying not to cry,” he points out.

Felicity sighs, sniffs once and rolls over onto her other side to face him. He can see the unshed tears on her face along with the tracks of those that did make it down to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to snoop. I’m just...really proud right now.”

He takes in her watery smile and matches it as best he can with his own. “It feels good to finally be talking openly with him.”

“Not just that,” she explains, slipping her arm around his waist and letting her fingers trace a somewhat nervous pattern on his lower back. “I know we’ve talked a lot about mental health before. Not recently, but maybe we should have.”

They have talked about it before. It was impossible not to talk about it the summer that they left their city behind in favor of a life without the responsibility of saving it, where Oliver became and an instantly lighter person without the continuous triggers to his PTSD. But while they had talked about it, talking is all they had done. Confiding in one another was assuring for them both, particularly when they were looking to start over with no secrets and no holding back, but neither were professionals in the delicate subject.

“I know,” he sighs, letting his hand match her trailing pattern. “I’m grateful to have someone who understands me as much as you do, but I think maybe as a family we should…”

“I agree,” she murmurs. “It’s been a rough few years.”

“And you’re on board with this?” he checks. “Because you don’t have to-”

“No, I’m completely on board,” she nods firmly. “It’s like you said, we’re a family now, and we owe it to ourselves and each other.”

Three weeks later after a doctors appointment for each of them, they start their individual sessions with ARGUS recommended counselors who they are able to be fully open with about what their lives have involved. On top of that, William and Oliver attend sessions together on a weekly basis to try and strengthen their relationship, and Felicity joins them all for a family bonding session every Sunday morning. 

It doesn’t fix everything.

But it’s a start.


End file.
